But no input on the whole"Monkey meat" issue that has the whole World gazing on in fascinated wonder? 
The condition of the original question asked is quite obviously equivalent to, “If I had a time machine and a magic wand that could transform cash of one era into the equivalent face amount in cash of another era,…” It has nothing to do with funds being transported forward through time by conventional means.
Then she should have asked a completely different question. Even if she did think she was asking for an explanation of “present value”, she obviously defines the term quite differently.
There is a program for the Palm called InflationMaster written by John Mayo-Smith. It is free and the current version is 2.7.
Anyway, ignoring all the interesting discussion, this program gives the value of $10,000 in 1933 as equal to $145,076.90 in 2004.
For what it’s worth.
Does this scale linearly? (I’d assume so).
Another interesting example. In a story in Unknown from the early 1940s, a man is cursed by having to spend $100 a night (in New York) on frivolous things. The question would be how much would the curse be for today, rather than how much would you get if you invested that money in 1941.
Assuming little inflation over the 8 years from 1933 to 1941, it would be about $1,450, right? That makes the story much easier to appreciate.
The Palm program inflationMaster is not linear, it apparently uses some “real” data.
For example, $1 in 1805 = 0.707 in 1830 = 0.597 in 1905 = 1.084 in 1930 = 5.35 in 1980 = 9.896 in 1995.
According to this, $100 in 1941 is $1283 today.
Interesting aside:
In “Carnivale” on HBO, which was set in the '30’s they showed people’s wallets with stacks of $10 bills, being lifted by carnival workers. That’s like carrying aound a stack of $100s today!
No credit cards, checking accounts were for the rich, no ATMs, and banks were open five days a week from 9 to 3. People needed to carry more cash then. (Before the depression, $1, $5, $10 and $20 coins were in use.)
And the start of the depression was marked by bank closures, too.
Not having to carry currency for the bulk of anticipated transactions and contingencies is pretty recent. As recently as the 70s I recall spending hours establishing a special arrangement in order to withdraw money from one different branch of my bank.
In the late 1980s, I had a part-time job at KMart. Every week we received a pay envelope with cash and a stub from a teller window next to the Men’s Employee Lounge.
Don’t forget $2 1/2 pieces also.
I wonder if it wouldn’t be worth considerably more than that in purchasing power today considering labor costs if the fellow were doing service sector-oriented stuff for entertainment. Going back to the pre-G.I. Bill (a very small % of the country having formal education), still largely agrarian US in '33 would be like visiting the Third World today. Especially during the Depression, with the downward wage pressures of that on top of the immigrant masses. The US was a very, very different country at the time with an economy and society structured very differently, and I think that pre-WWII the usual economic calculations might therefore fail in describing purchasing power for certain things.
I understand how labor costs are included in the value of goods, but this alone doesn’t account for the disparity in spending cash where and when service labor is dirt cheap, such as hotels, live theater, restaurants, etc. Are service costs included in CPIs?
My immediate thought in Voyager describing the story was “How would I spend $1,450 a night in, say, Hanoi or Kathmandu?” and honestly unless you head straight to the jewelry store (then a swanky restaurant, 3 bars, a brothel [no personal experience, I’m just trying to come up with possibilities for blowing cash] and the swankiest Western hotel in town) and go nuts with tips that’d be pretty difficult. (More specifically I’m thinking about the US$8 I spent for a very nice hotel room one particular night in Hoi An, and $3 for a multiple-course jumbo prawn dinner with $2/day motorscooter rental… I can’t imagine spending $100 there in a day let alone $1450, and I think this is closer to the scale of what we’re talking about.)
One way I like to think about this is in terms of shaving and shoeshines. In most of the Third World, you still have tons of shoeshine boys and a lot of men get shaven at the barbershop. The service costs are cheap enough that it’s cheaper to do this - even for the average person living in that economy at that wage scale - than to buy disposable razors and to shine your own shoes or just buy new ones when the old pair get scuffed. Goods are that much more valuable than services. In our economy, you’ll rarely see barbers shaving or bootblacks (when you do see either its usually connected to a hotel or office building area where its assumed well-heeled businessmen will spring for the luxury.) But both were commonplace here in 1933.
Here’s a “Box Office and Movie Ticket Adjuster” with a calculator that converts from/to 2005-1948. It doesn’t go back to 1933 and it doesn’t cover giant ape exhibits, but can possibly help the discussion.
As far as Box Office lists go, I wish they would include a “tickets sold” column. Tables such as:
http://home.earthlink.net/~mrob/pub/movies/topadj.html
…make much more sense to me.
Pat
Ahem, here’s the link to the “Box Office and Movie Ticket Adjuster”
http://www.leesmovieinfo.net/Adjuster.php
Pat
Thanks, BelezaPura. Here’s another of the same type. It has a drop down box that gives estimated tickets. Both the second link you gave and this one use ticket prices as estimated by the MPAA.
This bit stuck out for me in light of some of the discussion in this thread:
This is a perfectly sensible thing to do to get gross revenues. And gross revenues are a sensible thing to be interested in. But if you were interested in how profitable a film was, the fact that Snow White made a lot of its money long after its initial release would be very important: the revenue stream would have to be discounted by something like the interest rate. I’d expect that even though Gone with the Wind’s (inflation adjusted) gross was a little less than twice that of Snow White’s it was much more than twice as profitable.* To make a comparison of film profits, you’d then have to convert the discounted net revenues into constant dollars.
- [sub]Ignoring the costs of making the films for the sake of the point.[/sub]
Oops, I should also respond to Voyager’s post and Crandolph’s great response. Crandolph’s response to Voyager’s example nicely illustrates why there is no single answer to the question: the economy today is very different to how it was in the 30s.
Crandolph mentions third world economies and haircuts. (BTW, service costs are included in the CPI). This brings up the question of purchasing power parity: if exchange rates are determined in the market, how come you go to Hanoi as a tourist and heaps of things are cheap (even allowing for tariffs)? I’ve mentioned to Dex that I’ll try to draft a report on this issue.
Thanks for the CPI answer; I’d love to read such a staff report, it’s just fascinating stuff.
It’s sorta been done: Straight Dope Staff Report: Why is the Latvian lat worth more than the U.S. Dollar?